Combustible gasses are commonly used within many structures including industrial or manufacturing settings, residential buildings, and office buildings. Combustible gasses present unique challenges and can present immense danger when not contained properly.
Combustible gas leaks can present immediate danger to human life and structures. These dangers can arise from oxygen displacement, fire potential, or explosive potential.
Many prior developments have been advanced to detect gas leaks. These previous developments provide only partial solutions and present multiple disadvantages including being highly localized, expensive to implement and produce, being complicated, being prone to failure and miscalibration, and are generally only able to detect specific kinds or families of gasses.
One previous development includes catalytic detectors that utilize a reference and active coils. The active coil can be embedded within a catalyst. An exothermic reaction with combustible gases and oxygen can take place on the surface of the catalyst. In the presence of some combustible gases a temperature difference can be generated which is proportional to the gas concentration.
While catalytic detectors are generally considered to be robust, these detectors are highly localized and vulnerable to “poisoning” where the catalyst can become inactive due to contamination from chlorinated and silicon compounds. Detecting this sensitivity loss requires regular checking and calibration.
Another shortcoming of catalytic detectors is that catalytic detectors require the presence of oxygen. Even further, prolonged exposure to combustible gases can degrade the catalytic detector's performance and when flooded with high concentrations, the catalytic detectors may provide a low to no response.
Another previous development includes infrared detectors which detect the absorption of infrared radiation at various wavelengths as it passes through gas. Infrared detectors detect the difference between two infrared light beams, one beam passing through a reference cell the other passing through a sample cell.
While infrared do overcome some problems inherent to catalytic detectors like poisoning, Infrared detectors are also highly localized and provide only a partial solution to detecting gas leaks. Infrared detectors rely on absorption by a sample gas, and some hydrocarbons and other flammable gasses have very low absorption properties so are largely invisible to infrared detectors.
Infrared detectors also occupy a higher price point per detector with higher spare part costs, which can present challenges fielding infrared detectors over a large structure. Infrared detectors are also sensitive to high humidity and dust which increases maintenance costs and frequency. Infrared detectors also have a limited temperature range within which they can effectively operate and performance can be impaired when multiple gasses are present.
Solutions have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any complete solutions, and solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art. Thus there remains a considerable need for devices and methods that can provide a simple, robust, effective solution for gas detection that can operate without large maintenance requirements over a large general locality at an affordable price point.